KDDI Corporation And rdKind Inc. Reinforce Partnership rdKind Gets Funded By KDDIs Corporate Venture Capital

January 17, 2013

Tokyo, 17 January 2013 3rdKind Inc. (Headquarters: Chuo-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director & CEO: Taro Hosotsani; Representative Director & COO: Frederic Nouel; hereinafter referred to as 3rdKind) and KDDI Corporation (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Takashi Tanaka; hereinafter referred to as KDDI) are pleased to announce today, a reinforcement of their partnership through funding by KDDIs corporate venture capital, the "KDDI Open Innovation Fund" .

3rdKind is a Japanese smartphone apps publisher, which provides expertise and support for overseas developers on marketing, localization, development, and "culturization" for publishing smartphone apps to the Japanese market.

The "KDDI Open Innovation Fund", which is sponsored by KDDI and managed by Global Brain Corporation, was established in February 2012 as KDDIs first corporate venture fund for supporting promising startup companies.

This fund by KDDI and Global Brain will help 3rdKind to accelerate its growth and expand its Asian publishing business further in order to be the number one publisher in the region.

3rdKind will also focus more on new marketing tools and new social services in order to expand its games user base in Asia.

On July 2012, 3rdKind and KDDI officialized an exclusive co-publishing partnership, in order to bring free to play smartphone games developed by overseas companies to the Japanese market.

This partnership cover most of the current platform like iOS, Google Play and carriers own Android store like the auSmartPass by KDDI.

One of the major successes of this partnership is the publishing of the smartphone social game "Happy Street" which was featured as one of the "App Store Bests of 2012" by Apple.

Along with Happy Street, this partnership brought to Japan many overseas successful games like Edge, Cross Finger, Stardunk, iBlastMoki 1&2, iSlash.

About 3rdKind Headquarter Chuo Ku Nihonbashi Honkokucho 4-5-5, Tokyo, Japan

President Taro Hosotani & Frederic Nouel

Founded March 9th, 2011

Operations Smartphone game publishing and producing

URL

3rdKind Inc

LINK:	http://www.kddi.com/english/corporate/news_release/2013/0117/index.htm...
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